41 - Animating a screen capture or screencast

Hello! I just signed up for your courses, and so far I LOVE it! I'm trying to teach myself some of the fundamentals of video editing and motion graphics. I have a sample file that I'm trying to mimic for a client and I'm wondering if you can tell me how it was assembled? It's still imagery "animated" and a fairly simple "wipe" effect. I'm wondering if this was created in After Effects or another program. Can I send the mp4 to you for some pro analysis?

Tayla Coman - 1 year ago

Hi Amy, would you like to put the file on Dropbox and drop the link in here , I'll let Daniel know!

Hey there, what we're going to do now is look at-- we'll look at cameras a little bit more, but we're going to animate Screencast, or Screen Capture. You're watching right now, a Screencast, or Screen Capture where I'm showing you how After Effects works. What I'd like to do is sex him up a little bit for the intro video. I'll show you one that I've done for another course. This one here. I'll mute it, okay. It goes along, talking, talking... but then I get into showing demo, and all that sort of stuff. Watch this. Can you see this? It's kind of the screen's bending over backwards, now it's kind of moving fast, forwards it. I want to just do this for the vignettes, and try make it look kind of cool.

To do that-- let's go off and do it. So you, my friend, go away. Back in After Effects. So, let's make a 'New Composition', and let's bring in my Screen Capture footage. This one here called 'Screencast'. Let's make a 'Comp' for it. This one's got some audio on it, so let's turn that off. My Screencast here, at the moment, does nothing. If you're not on '4 Views'-- back to '1 View' down here. This is the safety zone, we're going to have to switch to '4 View' zone. We're going to insert our camera, let's go and make a camera. It's going to be a Two-Node camera, I'm going to leave it all as it is. We go to 'Camera' now.

Now there’s normally a warning that pops up and says, "Hey Dan, you forgot to make any sort of layout 3D, so the camera can see it." So in this case, we need to turn this layer on. Our Screencast needs to be seen by the camera. With it off, the camera can't see anything, blind. With that on, it can see that guy. What I want to do now is, I want the camera to move around. So we're going to move to '4 Views'. Maybe down this view here, the 'Front' view, we're going to switch this one from 'Front', so I've clicked down here. From 'Front' to the '1st Custom View', and you kind of see a nice angle there. You might have to zoom in and out to see it. Zooming in and out, I use my scroll wheel on my mouse, but you can hit 'Command' '+', or '-' to zoom in and out, or 'Control' '+' or '-' on a PC.

So, what we're going to do is, what we did before is we animated the point of interest. Now we're going to animate the camera, and leave the point of interest alone. So we're going to keep it centered on this. You watch this Screencast, it just goes through. You can see, it just needs adjusting some bits. Some people love to do things in Photoshop. What I need to do now is 'undo' the 'Transform' options. And we're going to ignore point of interest. We can play around with position. If I move position, can you see, both of these views here, I can drag this one up, this down. Remember, holding 'Shift' will increase speed.

It will always look at this, which is great. But I can move my camera to all sorts of places. Zooming in and out, left to right. I'm going to 'undo' until it's back to where it was to start off with. Where do you want it to move it to? That's totally up to you. I'm going to drag this down so we can see this view a bit more. So you can see it a bit better as well. I'm going to go to 'Full' view. Looks nice.

So, at the beginning here, I'm going to set my position. Actually, doesn't really matter what you do first. I'm going to have it on a nice little angle. So I'm going to start maybe over there. So I hold down 'Shift' while I'm dragging this first X-axis. I'm going to zoom it in a bit closer. Close to this last Z one, so I'm going to zoom. I'll move down a bit, so I can see with the camera down a bit. I'm going to kind of whiz past it like that, and maybe do some other stuff as well. Pretty exciting. So what we'll do is, take my first key frame, we got kind of an angle, and then I'm going to move it to the end, and I'm going to change it.

So I got my first key frame there, and then along here, I'm just going to-- what am I going to do? I'm not exactly sure. I'm going to do it kind of left, and away. Maybe look down at it. Oh, this is creative gold. May be there. You're going to move between this key frame, and this key frame, and just try to get it so it looks nice. Maybe mine, look at that, kind of nice, and moving. I'm going to go back to 'Quarter' view, make sure mine plays all way through. It stops playing, it's just because I've ran out of juice to keep going. He's adjusting, look at the little adjustments going on. How cool is that course? You can do it.

So that is how to do Screencasting. Now, what we might do is, just to make it look a bit nicer, I'll add in a vignette. I add vignettes to everything. I'm sure it's going to be naff as soon as-- I don't know, they've been around a while, the vignettes. People still like them, I like them. So I'm going to twirl all that up to keep it nice and simple. We could do it to the Screencast or to the camera, but it's easier to do vignettes, through 'New', 'Adjustment Layer'. Like an empty layer here. His whole job is to accept this thing called Lumetri Color. So, in 'Effects & Presets' just type in 'lume', and then hopefully that will cut down to that one. Drag it to the right layer, 'Adjustment Layer'. And all I'm going to do is, I'm going to probably just grab the amount. Drag it left. See this darkens the edges over here, I'll make it even more. A little more. I like it. Mine's got around pretty slowly so I'm going to have to go back to 'Third'.

Ah, look at the vignette around the outside. Beautiful! All right. There, that's how to animate your Screencasts. What I'll do is, I quite often, as I make one project, do one screen shot, do another one, and then stitch them all together later on to kind of turn it to this little thing with all the different bits. We might be doing different angles. All right, I'll see you in the next video.